Tuesday 17 January 2012 17.01 EST
First published on Tuesday 17 January 2012 17.01 EST

It is curious that in a climate when nearly 45 million Americans are in need of food stamps, unemployment stands at 8.5%, nearly 50 million people have no health insurance and tough economic times touch nearly all of the 99%, including an increasingly fragile middle class, the GOP would pin its 2012 electoral hopes on demonizing teachers and public workers and demeaning the economically strapped as lazy and shiftless. It is curioser still that the Republican base eats this rhetoric up with a spoon.

During the debate in South Carolina, Fox News correspondent Juan Williams challenged candidate Newt Gingrich about recent statements made along the campaign trail. The former House speaker had made like Ebenezer Scrooge ("Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons?"), questioning the work ethic of the disenfranchised, dismissing child labor laws and suggesting that poor children be given janitorial jobs. When Williams asked whether Gingrich's remarks weren't, in fact, belittling to all Americans, but especially racial minorities who face higher rates of poverty, he was roundly booed by the audience. Gingrich retorted:

"So here's my point: I believe every American of every background has been endowed by their creator with the right to pursue happiness. And if that makes liberals unhappy, I'm going to continue to find ways to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job, and learn someday to own the job."

At which, the crowd erupted in cheers that drowned out the debate moderators.

Take that Juan Williams! Why, Newt was just talking about the awesome American work ethic and the poor people who clearly need help acquiring it. Who said anything about race?

"It was a moment that will likely be dissected, debated and discussed for some time: a black journalist being booed by an overwhelmingly white audience in a deep South state on Martin Luther King Day, as a white candidate for president talked about the work ethic in low-income, majority black neighborhoods. It's hard to imagine a more charged few minutes in public life in recent memory."

It is true that Gingrich has avoided specifically mentioned African Americans in his tirades against the poor. He doesn't have to – because decades of Republican rhetoric have made blacks and other people of color the face of poverty. It does not matter that most Americans in need of government assistance look more like Gingrich than they do me, a black woman, the spectre of the Cadillac-driving "welfare queen" is as strong and racially-charged as it was when Ronald Reagan first invoked the fictional single mother from Chicago's heavily black South Side.

So, it is no surprise that Gingrich has been derisively calling President Obama a "food stamp president", accusing him of "putting more people on food stamps than any president in history." (A statement that Politifact calls a half-truth, noting that increased use of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or Snap, is related to the state of the economy and began during the presidency of President George W Bush.) The implication is that America's first black, biracial president is putting the fix in for poor people, who are, of course, mostly black.

Conservative talk radio ideologue Rush Limbaugh traded on the same implication when he referred to Obama's healthcare reform plans as reparations for slavery in disguise. And presidential candidate Rick Santorum almost gave the game away, when, forgetting to dogwhistle, he recently told a crowd in Sioux City, Iowa, "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money." (A statement he tried to walk back later by claiming he hadn't used, or hadn't meant to use, the word "black".)

It will not do for the majority of voters to ponder their own economic frailty or how hard-right policies contributed to it. It is better to mask the diversity of people in poverty and to position those suffering during the recession as a racial "them" against a hardworking, good American "us".

It is the ultimate way to make poverty a problem of the "other", to obscure the way social programs benefit everyone and to get people – hopped up on their most base, tribal instincts – to cheer while their own safety nets are snatched away.